"A winner, a champion, will accept his fate.
He will continue with his wheels in the dirt.
He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage.
But he is still racing. He is still alive.
The race is long. It is better to drive within oneself and finish the race behind the others than it is to drive too hard and crash."
My Soul experiencing a cleansing, my eyes a release, it was the best birthday gift.
"Why are you crying?" he inquired, after I voraciously consumed Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain, a novel he had just, hours before, given me on my thirty-seventh.
It was a quiet day, spent in solitude. With little to no telecommunications or virtual connection capacity, it was just me and the sound of crashing waves. He stopped in, mid-day. "I couldn't not see you on your birthday," he said, presenting a reusable bag filled with 'white elephant gifts' - three books and a small stuffed animal, representing Hayao Miyazaki's "Totoro."
I noticed my inner child pouting, beecoming defensive and wanting to push away. I allowed her some of her childish petulance and then I leaned into him and admitted to the obvious. "I am hurting," my wise woman said, as he just held me in his arms, rocking me like a babe in a manger.
Later that night, I cried fat rivulets of tears, as I reflected on purity and innocence, joy and pain, and a beelief system in something greater than this. We just laid there with him allowing me to bee exactly where I was by rubbing my back, then I answered his question. "LOVE and beelief make me cry. They are just so intrinsically beeautiful. So, I just cry."
Last year, for my thirty-sixth lap around the sun my focus was on mastery - especially where LOVE was concerned. As a result, there has been a shedding of a skin called ego, a sinking into a shared intimacy in which there is no question as to the depth of our closeness (thus I am free to exert my vital life force energy elsewhere), and an exertion of boundaries. This year, my focus is on embodying prosperous solutions for a collective way forward, which is, ultimately, my feeling of what bee-ing "number one" looks like. Watch me now!
"The car goes where the eyes go."
--Racing in the Rain
